Hammy but heartfelt

If romance is on the cards it's best to keep off the subject of money. Photograph: Valentina Petrova/AFP/Getty Images

Charles Lamb was the first Scrooge of Valentine's Day. "The weary and all forspent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of delicate embarrassments," he wrote in 1819. "In these little visual interpretations, the bestuck and bleeding heart is twisted and tortured into more allegories and affectations than an opera hat." Lamb's complaint about the annual cacophony of valentine kitsch is mirrored in the contemporary dismissal of this day as a "Hallmark holiday" - an excuse for the market to sell infinite varieties of tat.

Yet commercialism is not solely to blame. Valentine's Day is a unique public ritual, one that celebrates private passion. In other one-day festivals, like Halloween or bonfire night, the rituals are relatively fixed and have little private meaning. On Valentine's Day people have to work within the generic constraints but strive to be different. Love demands both careful protocol and grand gestures - a difficult balancing act.

This year's valentine cards have tried to get round this perennial problem by including very wordy messages, an adaptation of the traditionally tacky verse to today's default mode of psychotherapeutic candour: "Loving you has given life to my hopes and dreams and changed the way I look at so many things. Loving you has made me happier than I've ever been before. I don't know what kind of person I would have been without you, but I like the person I am because of you, and that makes me love you even more." Tender words, but perhaps better spoken than put in a card .

In his classic book Love in the Western World (1939), Denis de Rougemont traced the rituals of romantic love to Catharism, a neo-Manichaean religious heresy that briefly thrived in the courts of 12th-century Provence, and spread through France with the propagandistic assistance of the troubadours. This new ideal of courtly love was paradoxical: it was a burning, uncontrollable passion, but one with its own strict codes of language and behaviour, a cultural myth that had, in De Rougemont's words, "withdrawn into the human breast".

At first these rituals were the preserve of the high-born and literate, but in the 18th century they began to filter down the social scale. Enterprising publishers churned out "valentine writers" - idiot's guides to lovemaking - which semi-literate, socially nervous lovers could consult when composing their romantic missives. The mass-produced valentine of the early 19th century onwards democratised these rituals completely. A 1924 Times editorial noted St Valentine's violent death and speculated that "had he known some of the execrable sentiments, the breaches of elementary taste which were to be dispersed in his name, one feels that physical suffering would have been the least part of his martyrdom". But the conventions of romantic love had always been artificial and sentimental. All that had changed was that they had moved from the rarefied world of high art into everyday life and commerce.

A medieval Provençal knight would have understood that the rituals of love are a kind of sincere performance, at once heartfelt and hammy. You might proclaim your undying love for someone and mean it, but you are not exactly being original. The words "I love you", as the literary theorist Jonathan Culler once wrote, are always a quotation. On Valentine's Day, the war against cliche is futile. Love itself is a cliche. Forget the delicately crafted newspaper message, or the quirky gift like the silver-plated "last Rolo". Buy a giant teddy holding a red satin heart. Or, better still, a helium balloon with a picture of a puppy and the words "I woof you". If you really must persist in this neo-Manichaean heresy, you might as well go with the flow.